The commencement of global business ventures has increased the importance of multi-language proficiency for various job roles. Since spoken English excellence is a crucial requirement for customer-facing businesses, assessing candidates for communication skills using language proficiency tests has become vital for organizations during campus hiring.
Companies in customer support, tech support, sales, business development jobs, etc., systematically analyze individuals’ English proficiency and gauge their effective communication skills. This is because hiring a language-proficient candidate helps build the brand image and improve customer communication in the long term. These candidates are equipped to understand clients’ requirements, resolve client challenges, offer optimum support at various sales funnel stages, and ensure clarity and transparency within the entire system.
For this reason, the first round of interviews assesses the candidate’s personality, aptitude, and language skills. While candidates often claim expertise in English in their resume, it may not be their strongest skill.
In this regard, the thin line between language ability and proficiency must be highlighted. Language ability is understanding, reading, and speaking, a language to convey what’s important. However, proficiency demands a command over the language.
Therefore, companies must consider and conduct an English test for recruitment rather than only relying on candidates’ resumes. Mercer | Mettl’s language proficiency tests help evaluate candidates’ reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills.
Employers must assess English proficiency during hiring as:
- It is a vital and convenient filter to eliminate candidates that do not fit the job role.
- Helps identify the communication skills of existing employees to identify gaps within the organization.
- Facilitates the right candidate selection for global roles.
- Helps recruiters improve hiring processes and make unbiased assessments.
- Speeds up the hiring process by shortlisting relevant candidates within the first few rounds.
The test features depend on the job types that companies are hiring for. For instance, a customer support executive who needs to communicate with customers on-call must have the required English-speaking skills. Similarly, a person creating and sending client proposals must have proficiency in English-writing skills.
The ability to speak, understand, and write English is an essential parameter for recruiters to search for candidates in customer-facing roles. People who can read, understand, write, and communicate efficiently in English can also comprehend instructions, reports, memos, notices, letters, and other essential official documents without challenges.
For example, a candidate considered for a managerial position must have excellent communication skills, as they must present, convene meetings, and negotiate with clients. Proficiency in English helps them clearly convey their point of view, suggest changes, and modify the strategy after understanding and considering the client’s input.
Some benefits of English language proficiency assessment are:
Enhanced efficiency of the recruitment process
Hiring managers must create filters that help identify and shortlist capable candidates in the initial stages. Therefore, using an English test for recruitment at the beginning of the hiring process aids in finding the best-fit candidate.
Standardized recruitment process
Language proficiency tests promote a standard way of measuring proficiency and eliminating subjectivity and bias from the recruitment process. Hiring managers can ensure a fair recruitment process by establishing a minimum level of English proficiency for each role. This ensures candidates are measured on the same metric.
For example, Mercer | Mettl’s SpeechX uses artificial intelligence to evaluate candidates’ English proficiency according to their job roles. It assesses candidates for fluency, listening comprehension, grammar, and pronunciation necessary for relevant profiles.
Mercer | Mettl’s CEO, Siddhartha Gupta, shared, “The introduction of SpeechX by Mercer | Mettl reflects its mission to advance talent measurement to unmapped subject domains. It aims to remove biases or functions of human errors by maintaining audibility and consistency throughout the assessment cycle.”
Improved cross-team movement
Hiring employees proficient in the English language increases chances for cross-team movement in the future. These employees are better equipped to move internally to a new job role within the organization.
Reduced turnover
Employees better equipped to handle a job role through their language and technical expertise are less likely to leave the organization.
According to Forbes, the most detrimental consequences of language barriers in an organization include the following:
- Miscommunications that cause inefficiency (67%)
- The inability of the employees to collaborate effectively (46%)
- Lower productivity that required standards (42%)
- Poor customer service (37%)
- Workers lack respect for seniors (24%)
- Becomes difficult to attract and retain talent (24%)
- Worker safety is compromised (21%)
- Reduction in employee retention (16%)
- Other (1%)
Assessing English proficiency using language proficiency tests during campus hiring is highly relevant to fill your organization with competent employees who will help improve client communication, employee collaboration, and service quality.
